12 Best SEO Trends for the Year 2015

Undoubtedly, the world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is constantly evolving. This has made Google and all of the other major search engines strive really hard to enhance search results via making changes to their algorithms and make decisions on techniques adopted for ‘bots’ crawling websites. Hence, staying on top may be difficult. 2014 was a decent year for SEO. Most of the emphasis was paid on useful, impressive and high quality content, we recommend SEO services done right by Updraft in Portland, Oregon. With the advent of 2015, here’s a sneak peak on what to expect precisely for SEO this year:

1. SEO and Content Marketing will Rule

Both of these terms will continue to be important for websites. Digital marketing and content marketing is what SEO will remain focussed on to derive positive search engine results. Content marketers and SEO experts will get more work and earn more!

2. A Change in Search Engine Platform!

The year 2015 will see a huge shift in the long existing search engine landscape. Presently, market share of Yahoo is experiencing a high owing to their deal to appear as the default search engine for Firefox web browser. This combined with another rumour that Apple is looking forward to drop Google from all of it’s Safari browsers on iPad and iPhone. It will be replaced with Bing and Yahoo. So it indicates that the significance and power of Google will be heavily reduced. DuckDuckGo, a search engine riding high on both privacy and non-personalised search will be accessible as a new search option in both iOS8 and OS X.

3. Search Results Evolution

The aptitude of Google to understand natural language is getting efficient and faster. Google is looking forward to turn into a new destination for varied on-page search result answers including:

Sports scores

Weather updates

Celebrity related info

Websites need to get their key information relevant, aptly summarised, and presented really well to user within the SERPs.

4. Personalisation is Important

With present age search functionalities becoming highly complicated, customers will be exposed to greater and simplified levels of personalisation. Hence, each individual may experience altered results for similar query. This depends on both local and demographic data collected from earlier engagements. So organizations need to be well prepared to offer enhanced personalisation levels to their customers especially across all available search platforms. This is one of the best ways to convert.

5. Brands are Important

Although premium grade relevant backlinks continue to hold huge importance, search engines will prefer brand mentions more. This is precisely related info source website mentions about your website brand. A backlink may not be required to give you some value.

6. Plain Text Vs. Multimedia

Original, relevant, and very high quality original content comprising of visual elements such as images, video, and eye catching graphics will continue to enjoy importance in the field of SEO in the year 2015. Google loves to index lengthy content loaded with text and provides it a nice place in SERPs. However, from now on, plain text will receive slight penalties. This is owing to the realization by search engines that consumers hate digging their heads into text-only content. Hence, video marketing will gain prominence in digital marketing strategies. Embedding these amazing videos to your website and marketing them will definitely increase search engine visibility of your site.

7. Negative SEO – Beware!

What is negative SEO? Well, it is precisely a description for individual, primarily a competitor trying to defame and de-rank your website. It is also about a serious attempt on reducing search engine traffic to your site significantly. As per recent reports, all business in the year 2015 should exercise caution and work seriously towards defending themselves against these tactic. The best way to do this is to indulge in regular audits of backlink profile of websites. The practise has now turned into a prerequisite for all digital marketers. Let’s also hope that Google finds some real good techniques ways to locate manipulative links and penalise all perpetrators.

8. Mobile Friendly Design or a Total Failure!

2014 was the year that mobile Internet (inevitably) surpassed desktop Internet use. Google have recently started sending out ‘Webmaster warnings’ to websites with poor mobile user experience. This was combined with Google’s announcement about page speed and user-experience as crucial parameters for ranking. It is more than daunting that most big websites possess a well built and organized mobile proposition. Continual ignorance of this trend by businesses may suffer from organic traffic fall. So it is high time you incorporate mobile responsiveness into web design to help it adapt flawlessly to a phone screen size.

9. HTTP Secure Year

It has been already endorsed by Google that HTTPS secure websites will benefit from ranking advantage over other standard sites. So in a few year’s time, HTTPS sites may start receiving decent boost. In case, your website involves collection of sensitive personal information or payments, simply equip it with the latest security tools.

10. Don’t Ignore Social Media

Brand citations have emerged as crucial ranking metric. In the past few years, there has been good amount of related to use of social signals by Google as a ranking element in its algorithm. This has already lead to a good number of heated arguments and long debates. Although Google has been denying these claims regularly, detailed studies and research has displayed a very strong correlation between good rankings and social signals. Hence, even if you are under the notion that social plays just an indirect role in page rankings, creating a strong social media presence will make for an amazing platform to boost brand awareness. This increases the content sharing rate having positive impact on search ranking results.

11. Exterminate All Website Errors

Regardless of how small they are, website errors can kill the overall impact of SEO. The PageRank gets diluted and crawlers are prevented from indexing content and pages. In short, the website suffers from poor user-experience. Hence, it is crucial to focus on fixing any no broken links and errors reported in Google Webmasters.

12. Content Rules

This has been existing since ages and the trend is here to rule. Google has now employed better techniques to single out websites trying to cheat the system using SEO hat techniques in black and various shades of grey. Google is all armed and will continue to penalise users trying to cheat the system. High-quality, precise, useful, and impressive content postings consistently to website will certainly helps.

In a Nutshell

To keep esteemed patrons and sought after visitors happy, you must consider organic search traffic and Search Engine Optimisation. The future of SEO involves consistent evolution. This means organizations not focussing on re-evaluating their SEO strategies will lag behind.